Julia Kristeva

“Já não há histórias de amor. No entanto, as mulheres desejam-nas e os homens também, quando não se envergonham de ser ternos e tristes como as mulheres. Uns e outros têm pressa de ganhar e de morrer. Apanham aviões, comboios suburbanos, rápidos de alta velocidade, ligações. Não têm tempo para olhar para aquela acácia cor-de-rosa que estende os ramos para as nuvens intervaladas de seda azul ensolarada (…) Bem se vê que não há tempo sem amor. O tempo é amor pelas pequenas coisas, pelos sonhos, pelos desejos. Não temos tempo porque não temos amor suficiente. Perdemos o nosso tempo quando não amamos. Esquecemos o tempo passado quando nada temos a dizer a ninguém. Ou então estamos prisioneiros de um tempo falso que não passa.”

“The other that will guide you and itself through this dissolution is a rhythm, text, music, and within language, a text. But what is the connection that holds you both together? Counter-desire, the negative of desire, inside-out desire, capable of questioning (or provoking) its own infinite quest. Romantic, filial, adolescent, exclusive, blind and Oedipal: it is all that, but for others. It returns to where you are, both of you, disappointed, irritated, ambitious, in love with history, critical, on the edge and even in the midst of its own identity crisis; a crisis of enunciation and of the interdependence of its movements, an instinctual drive that descends in waves, tearing apart the symbolic thesis.”

“Abjection is above all ambiguity. Because, while releasing a hold, it does not radically cut off the subject from what threatens it --- on the contrary, abjection acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger.”

“[the abject] is simply a frontier, a repulsive gift that the Other, having become alter ego, drops so that the "I" does not disappear in it but finds, in that sublime alienation, a forfeited existence.”

“The depressed person is a radical, sullen atheist.”

“That faith be analyzable does not necessarily imply a method for getting by without it. . . .”

“Today’s milestone is human madness. Politics is a part of it, particularly in its lethal outbursts. Politics is not, as it was for Hannah Arendt, the field where human freedom is unfurled. The modern world, the world of world war, the Third World, the underground world of death that acts upon us, do not have the civilized splendor of the Greek city state. The modern political domain is massively, in totalitarian fashion, social, leveling, exhausting. Hence madness is a space of antisocial, apolitical, and paradoxically free individuation”

“When the starry sky, a vista of open seas, or a stained-glass window shedding purple beams fascinate me, there is a cluster of meaning, of colors, of words, of caresses, there are light touches, scents, sighs, cadences that arise, shroud me, carry me away, and sweep me beyond the things I see, hear, or think, The "sublime" object dissolves in the raptures of a bottomless memory. It is such a memory, which, from stopping point to stopping point, remembrance to remembrance, love to love, transfers that object to the refulgent point of the dazzlement in which I stray in order to be.”

“Naming suffering, exalting it, dissecting it into its smallest components – that is doubtless a way to curb mourning.”